14 Music Week 07.12.12
BUSINESS ANALYSISQ4SALES EDITORIAL
Has holding out for the Q4 charge backfired?
RETAILERS RIGHTLY MOANED EARLIER THIS YEAR about too many frontline albums being held back until Q4. However, rather than this creating pent-up demand, the sudden influx since September of all these priority releases has failed to halt another painful double-digit sales decline during the Christmas run-in. Certainly part of this continuing fall-off can be explained away
by the shift in the way consumers buy albums from physical to digital. That may sound like a convenient excuse, but this same situation started to play out in the States several years earlier when the albums sector there suffered horrible annual falls of 10% or more, while on this side of the Atlantic we could smugly point to a far more robust market. Now the trends are reversed with the more mature digital
albums business in the States last year helping to deliver the first annual rise there in seven years. Admittedly, the US market is back in the red in 2012, but only by around 4%, about one- third of the decline happening here. That has to suggest at some stage in the not-too-distant future we should be enjoying less-harsh falls again and eventually gains. But, alongside these general trends, there is no escaping the
fact that many of the supposed bankers that labels decided to tuck away for Christmas have not shifted in anything approaching the quantities that might have been expected. Although some acts’ new albums have sold more copies week one than their last offerings did, including those by Mumford & Sons and One Direction, too many others have suffered sales drop-offs far bigger than the overall market decline. These include Leona Lewis (below) whose Glassheart opened
with just 17% of the sales Echo did in 2009 and Robbie Williams who attracted 35% of the buyers for Take The Crown he did for his last studio set three years ago. Over a shorter time gap, the opening sales of JLS and Susan Boyle’s new albums were under half what their 2011 releases managed, while even Rihanna’s first-week sales have dropped in a year by 39%.
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SHAKEN ANDS Q4’S TOP 10 DOWN B
Considering 2011’s final quarter hardly blazed a trail in terms year’s Q4 – that the leading artist album sales have fallen by
LEFT/RIGHT Downturn?: Rihanna saw her sales fall compared to 2011 while One Direction were below Michael Bublé’s Christmas, the big seller of last year – but Muse’s figures helped the Q4 totals
QUARTERLY FOCUS BY PAUL WILLIAMS
Q
4’s 10 leading artist albums have collectively sold a third fewer copies than their equivalent titles managed 12 months ago. As a whole the pre-Christmas market is
struggling to come anywhere near to matching the sales achieved in 2011 with unit album sales down by 12.9% year-on-year during the quarter’s opening nine weeks, according to the Official Charts Company. However, right at the top end of the market the
decline is even more extreme with the 10 biggest artist albums between them having shifted 35.0% fewer units than the corresponding releases realised last year. That adds up to around 1 million fewer sales being achieved by what are the industry’s biggest artist releases in the Christmas run-in, while overall around 2.7 million fewer albums have been sold in the first nine weeks of Q4 compared to over the same period in 2011, leaving the quarter’s running total at 18.4 million albums. The annual decline is most clearly illustrated
These individual declines collectively add up to hundreds of thousands of sales not being achieved in the Christmas market compared to 2011 with the popularity of newer acts like Jake Bugg far from enough to make up the shortfall. By contrast, the compilations revival shows no signs of
stopping with Q4 sales up around 7% on the year. For a sector that some suggested could not survive a digital age where consumers can create their own hit packages this is a remarkable achievement and should give hope that what is currently being endured by the sister artist albums market is only temporary.
right at the very top by One Direction’s second Syco album Take Me Home. Up until last week it was the quarter’s top artist seller but its sales of 301,648 were 39.2% fewer than what Reprise/Warner Bros act Michael Bublé’s Christmas sold to lead the listings over the same timeframe in 2011. Take Me Home’s sales would only have been good enough to rank in fourth place on the chart ranking the top artist sellers during the first nine weeks of Q4 last year, while sales of Q4 2012’s 10th leading artist title, Merry Christmas, Baby by Verve’s Rod Stewart, would have only secured 17th spot. The year-on-year decline is further put into
context by the fact the closing three months of 2011 were hardly amazing. In fact, total album sales in the first nine weeks of Q4 last year were down by around 10%. Although there have clearly been some big-
Paul Williams, Head of Business Analysis Do you have views on this column? Feel free to comment by emailing
paul.williams@intentmedia.co.uk
name albums released in time for Christmas, including new studio sets from One Direction, Rihanna and Robbie Williams, they have not sold
enough to make up for the lack of strength in depth at the top end of the market. This all follows what was a very positive sales start to the quarter. In the period’s opening week album sales were
down by just 0.6% on the corresponding week in 2011, helped by Muse’s Helium 3/Warner Bros album The 2nd Law topping the artist countdown with 108,536 copies sold, nearly 200% more than Island act James Morrison’s chart-topping The Awakening managed exactly 12 months earlier. However, the Muse album was one of only four
No.1s in the quarter to date to reach the top with more copies sold than the equivalent chart-topping album did in 2011. Also breaking the trend was Mumford & Sons’ Babel, which returned to No.1 the week after Muse, Robbie Williams’ introductory Island set Take The Crown and Syco act One Direction’s Take Me Home, which sold 81.0% more copies than Reprise/Warner Bros act Michael Bublé’s Christmas did to top the chart in the second last week of November 2011. Weekly sales of Q4’s other artist chart-toppers
have been between 14.5% and 70.8% lower than what the No 1s in the corresponding weeks sold in 2011, while there have been sizeable year-on-year sales declines at other key positions on the weekly artist albums chart. Sales of the 10th top seller each week have been between 3.7% and 44.6% lower than on the corresponding chart in 2011, sales of the No.40 seller between 3.9% higher and 31.4% lower and sales of the No.75 seller between 9.7% higher and 38.4% lower. Although album sales in the first week of the
quarter were down by less than 1% compared to the same week in 2011, in every other week since the drop has been much more severe, ranging from 7.6% to 18.9%, which happened four weeks in when Mercury act Taylor Swift’s Red reached No.1 after selling 61,779 copies but was up against Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto shifting 208,343 copies 12 months before. The decline in the albums market has expectedly
been most heavily felt on CD with the physical market down in the opening nine weeks of Q4 by
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